Today, I was in Odaiba, the man-made island in Tokyo Bay. The island is known for its futuristic buildings. Today, it was home of the Japan Classic Car Association’s New Year Meeting. It celebrates the imported car. During the next days, I will show you the nicer ones. We start with the Americans, and a Dodge.

The tonier places in America, like Pebble Beach and Hilton Head, are known for their Concours d’Elegance, something the organizers wanted to bring to Tokyo. It looks like it was damaged in transit.

Some of the first cars in Japan were American, just like this early Dodge Brothers model. The first car made in Japan, in 1902, was powered by a gasoline engine, hand-imported from the U.S. by Komanosuke Uchiyama. Five years later, he produced the first entirely Japanese-made car.

Detroit pretty much owned the Japanese car market before the war. Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors all had production plants in the island nation. Between 1925 and 1936, the Big Three produced 208,967 cars in Japan. Japanese automakers, and there were many, made only 12,127.

Cars imported to Japan, mostly from America and England, did set the style for Japanese cars.

After the war, American makers liked to use their British subsidiaries to export cars to Japan. This is the egg crate grille of a Nash Metropolitan Roadster, built between 1953 and 1961 at Austin’s Longbridge plant.

Except that this Nash has the steering wheel on the left. Must have been the export model.

This is a Ford Prefect, built in the UK.

It looks like the 100E (1953 to 1959). Its steering wheel is at the right left, I mean, it was left at the right side. Next to the Prefect sits a BMW 2002, the predecessor of the 3-series. I had one of those, also in Bavarian Blue.

Wedged between a Porsche and a Triumph, a Shelby GT350. When this car came to Japan, the glory of American imports in Japan began to fade, and the Europeans took over. We will look at them tomorrow.

21 Comments on “Reporting From The Concoures D’eregance In Tokyo: The Americans In Japan...”

The prefect is in Indeed a 100E model ( later ones were 107E with the OHV engine) .Japans Nissan motor company was started by an American as the DAT motor company building Austin 7 sevens under license .As result Austins DNA was prevelent right through to the 1970’s. The Datsun 1200 engine was an improved BMC A series which found homes here in Australia in morris Minors as a performance upgrade.

I’ve seen some pretty horrible mis-translations over the years, but I’m guessing that the mistake on the brochure was on purpose. The sad thing is that half of the attendees didn’t get the joke.

I love the R/L pronunciation problem, especially when people want to talk to me about the American erection. “I think Obama-san’s erection is good for America!” I giggle like an idiot for months and months when there is an erection coming on.

The problem is how they do it. There was a tiny movement years ago when I was teaching English in Kyoto that was trying to get the Japanese Ministry of Education to do away with katakana (a special script the Japanese use when they write foreign words) and just write foreign words in Romaji (Roman characters).

The idea is that Katakana forces changes in what might otherwise be decent English/French/German etc pronunciation by inflicting a specialized set of writing that makes you say it with a terrible Japanese accent. Generally, Japanese read roman script pretty well, that’s why a written error like the one above is so uncommon. To make that happen someone would have had to write it in katakana and then do an exact translation across to roman.

When I think about the time and effort I have expended in that country teaching English and later promoting English education, this kind of thing makes me sick to my stomach.

I would be curious to know if, as you imply, the coming of the American muscle car era wasn’t just coincident with the decline of American cars in Japan. Modern Japanese gasoline as of ~10 years ago was inferior in almost every way to American gasoline except for the crap Americans mix into the gas (MTBE and ethanol). Even still, it’s lower-octane and has a much higher vapor pressure (it evaporates more easily) which makes proper tuning in a hot/humid environment quite difficult. I know carbureted golf carts in Japan had vapor lock issues that arose due to differences in gasoline used for testing, and those engines rarely if ever come up to full operating temperature due to frequent shutoffs and inordinately long playing times in Japanese Golf.

Muscle cars, even in America, ran hot. In the pre-EFI low-compression/smog/malaise era vapor lock wasn’t entirely uncommon. If the inferiority of Japanese gas went way back into the 60s the increase of power and compression levels in American cars in the late-60s could have been the *cause* of the decline of American imports due to the operational issues those would have caused with poor gasoline.

That round logo shield is covering the hole for the crank to start the car, so the disc is probably from a later Chrysler Imperial, used just because it fit. Dodge had electric starters from an early date, but continued to keep the crank hole through the radiator for emergency starting.

Early American cars didn’t even have a standard for placing the wheel. It was Henry Ford’s standardized LHD Model T that induced other manufacturers to use LHD as a standard. There weren’t exactly lanes in the early days either. Passing wagons observed the nautical habit of ships moving right so their left (port) sides faced each other. Without oncoming traffic, those Model T’s just drove right down the middle of America’s narrow roads, and people roadhog whenever possible to this day!

And yet, there are a few LHD cars in Japan – some folks like them because they’re different – a fair amount of BMWs and Mercs in Japan are LHD. Never mind that they have to use a long pole with a basket to pay highway and bridge tolls.